Three former Meta AI leaders—Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, and Dhruv Batra—have teamed up to launch Yutori, a new startup aiming to redefine the role of AI personal assistants. On Thursday, the company announced it has raised $15 million in seed funding to build what it calls a more intelligent, personalized, and context-aware assistant for modern digital life.
The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with participation from Felicis, and prominent individual investors including AI trailblazer Fei-Fei Li and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. The early backing underscores Yutori’s ambition—and its potential to make a serious impact in an increasingly crowded AI landscape.
A World-Class Founding Team
Yutori’s founding trio brings serious AI firepower to the table. All three co-founders—Das, Parikh, and Batra—worked together at Meta AI and are recognized as leaders in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and human-AI interaction.
- Abhishek Das is known for his work in multimodal AI and vision-language models.
- Devi Parikh has made major contributions to AI interpretability and fairness.
- Dhruv Batra, a former research director at Meta, previously led teams working on embodied AI and AI reasoning.
Together, they’ve authored dozens of influential research papers and helped advance Meta’s most ambitious AI efforts. Now, they’re focused on building a product that brings those advances to everyday users.
“Our goal with Yutori is to create an assistant that understands you—your goals, your context, your preferences—and can truly help you get things done across your digital life,” the founders said in a joint statement.
Beyond the Chatbot
The AI assistant market has seen explosive growth in the past year, with players like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft racing to embed language models into productivity tools. But Yutori is taking a different approach—aiming to move beyond reactive Q&A bots to something far more integrated and proactive.
Rather than functioning as a generic chatbot or voice interface, Yutori is building a system that learns from context, adapts over time, and operates seamlessly across apps and platforms.
The assistant is being designed to:
- Understand long-term user goals and workflows
- Integrate with tools like email, calendar, Slack, Notion, and more
- Surface relevant information before the user asks for it
- Offer helpful, memory-aware suggestions that span days or weeks of activity
In short, the founders envision Yutori not just as a tool, but as a cognitive collaborator—a digital teammate that evolves with its user.
Privacy-First, Enterprise-Ready
Yutori is also placing a strong emphasis on data privacy and trust, a growing concern in the age of AI assistants that access sensitive information across apps.
From the ground up, the platform is being built with a privacy-first architecture, offering users control over what the assistant can access and how their data is stored. For enterprise customers, the company plans to support deployment models that include private cloud or on-premise options.
“We believe that trust is foundational,” said the Yutori team. “If an AI assistant is going to live alongside your emails, documents, and calendar, it needs to earn that trust through transparency, security, and respect for privacy.”
Why the Investors Are Excited
Lead investor Rob Toews of Radical Ventures called Yutori “a world-class founding team building a transformative product at exactly the right moment.”
Other backers echoed the sentiment. Fei-Fei Li, who has helped shape the AI field for decades, noted that Yutori is “tackling one of the most human-centered challenges in AI: building assistants that understand and support us, not just respond to us.”
Jeff Dean, a foundational figure in modern AI, described the startup as having “the technical depth and product vision to create a new category of personal intelligence.”
What’s Next for Yutori
With the $15 million seed round secured, Yutori is scaling up its engineering and product teams, with plans to roll out a private beta later in 2025. The company is actively hiring across AI research, product design, and systems engineering.
Early testers will include professionals looking to streamline complex digital workflows, and eventually, the company plans to expand to a broader audience—including enterprise deployments.
While much about the product remains under wraps, the team says more announcements will follow in the coming months.
“We’re still early,” the founders said, “but we’re excited to bring a new kind of assistant to life—one that truly understands, remembers, and helps.”
As the race to build truly intelligent assistants heats up, Yutori’s pedigree, focus on long-term context, and user-first approach may give it an edge in reshaping how we work and live alongside AI.
